


Can't stop (falling)

by Coldest_Fire



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson, Heathers: The Musical - Murphy & O'Keefe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Band, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Music, Connor as a singer and a guitarist, F/M, I am a writing major and I do this instead of homework, I don't know how to write lyrics, I mean both fandoms deal with suicide as major themes, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, JD and Ronnie meet after high school, JD on the drums (and some rare times his sax probably), M/M, My GF is my cowriter and I love her, OFC bassist, OMC rhythm guitar, POV Alternating, POV Multiple, POV Third Person, Referenced Suicide Attempt, Suicidal Thoughts, although really that's just canon, attempts at writing music, band au, but no one actually dies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 21:42:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14174001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coldest_Fire/pseuds/Coldest_Fire
Summary: Connor Murphy survives high school, joins a band, and tries to find something to live for. Evan Hansen catches them live at a bar, and starts to wonder if, finally this is someone he doesn't have to lie to."...I'm falling so I can fly..."





	Can't stop (falling)

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone! thanks for reading, and hopefully for enjoying. This was written due to a lot of procrastination of actual homework I should have been doing. please feel free to leave reviews!

Did it even matter that he was alive?

That was what he thought about, when he went to bed, increasingly later each night, to stave off the usual existential dread that encompassed him whenever he took his headphones out. He tried writing lyrics when he tried to sleep, but even that didn’t spare him, didn’t make the thoughts go away. It didn’t matter. He spent all night coming up with why he should feel good about anything. Yeah, today he walked the stage, high as a fucking kite, and took the piece of paper that said he did enough shit—and more importantly didn’t slit his wrists through high school, but none of it really mattered. The world was the same shitty place with or without him. He didn’t see how it made a difference. Even his band, his sole reason to survive would replace him. 

_“I’m just another mark to erase,_  
another empty bottle to replace,  
Sick of running the human race  
tonight I vanish without a trace  
Vanish without a trace.” 

He sat up to write that down, thinking, maybe it could make a decent chorus, leafing through the notebook to scrawl it on one of the last available pages. On the line before it was a few scribbled out lines and a few lines he’d written before his graduation, which he was certain would be utter shit. 

_“Just another paper, ways to say we matter_  
when we’d fucking shatter  
If only there’d be no sound,   
But it looks like we’re going down,   
looks like we’re going down, 

_In history, maybe, maybe another name not on the pages_  
Of history, maybe, If she can make history, what about me?  
Can I be history of a different kind,  
Would i have to make history to change your mind?” 

He groaned. Sentimental bullshit. They were a metal band, their songs were supposed to be stronger. He wrote best when Larry pissed him off, but then it was tangles of fury, spiked cursive that sought to tear into him with every point. Now he was just empty, and desperate for anyone to give a shit about him, anyone to prove that he couldn’t just disappear. He’d been lucky to meet their bassist when he was starting out of the computer lab that day, the day he could have died, had she not swiped his sleeping pills, and replaced them with a card for an open audition. They called her Siren, and the first thing he was told was that no one in the group got to fuck her, because she was the mom of the group, and they all needed her for that, more than sex. 

Suited him just fine, though he wouldn’t tell them why. The other two: JD and Alex seemed alright, though he was sure the group kept him around because he had a bit of an ability with lyrics, and guitar, which let Siren take bass, or duel him in solos or shit. JD sometimes pitched in with lyrics, when Connor let him. For the most part though, no one even got to read them over before he sang, just telling them what the melody was like. No one would discern the vulnerabilities he hid in the screaming. It took better equipment than they had to keep that intelligible. And when he did sing, the others would typically have to focus on their own instruments, and keep up, but not in his latest song. 

There was a terrifying moment after the Siren’s bass solo, where he was singing alone, the rest of the band resting before they came in on cue. “When I’m falling I’ll try to fly, fly away from this world and I, I couldn’t stop if I needed to, cause there’s nothing else left to do…” and they were in. It was the most personal he’d gotten that he knew they heard, something terrifying. He almost waited for someone to make his fucking day and tell him that he was being melodramatic, quote Larry, just once. 

It never came, but Siren asked him if he’d try a love song. Singing about wanting to die and hating his family would only get them so far. He declined. If love wasn’t real, there was no point singing about it, was there? But as he lay, staring up to the ceiling, watching the flickering light from the traffic lights reflect across the stucco, he tried to write something like what she wanted.

_“this song goes out to no one,_  
If you were real you’d run,   
I like to think that you’d see  
All of the pieces of me. 

_This song goes out to somebody,_  
your’e better without me  
cause all of my edges,  
would give us both stitches.” 

He groaned. Siren would be pissed when it wasn’t the sappy thing about some girl she wanted to perform. Connor didn’t even want a girl, but the band didn’t know. He kept it all hidden, except from the night, as he thought of reprises, wondered if his lyrics were true, if, whoever he was, he was better off without Connor. Fuck, he wished he’d just gone to bed a little bit high. Maybe then he could relax. 

But he awoke that morning, and the next, and the next, through about 5 years. It was on one of their busier nights, one where the venue was actually close to sold out that he met him. By his second song (falling) he was on his knees, singing the exposed lines with his eyes shut, and his heart tearing into his ribs from the inside. The catharsis was both incredible and brutal for this one. As he stood back up, about to reprise the guitar riff, he saw a bright blue speck by the bar, and saw the audience member wearing it entranced, biting his lip to keep tears at bay. And then Connor strummed hard, throwing the band into the song, flipping his lyrics, “When I’m flying, I learn to fall, and nobody hears at all, lying broken to watch it bleed, though its never what I need, all of the breaths I try to take, every time I try to make it out alive…I’m falling so I can fly…”

That was enough, he supposed the improvised lyrics hit the kid in blue. He watched a tear slide down his cheek, a little satisfied that the lyrics that ripped into him. He wondered if the kid got it, if the boy in blue somehow understood. But there was no time to think, as he launched the band into a faster paced, harder hitting song, where he could lose himself in the fury, forget the emptiness Falling always brought out in him. 

The show was a hit. Connor left the backstage area to order a drink, seeing the boy in blue gushing at the bartender, and catching snippets of their conversation through the dull roar of the bar. “…It’s just…I didn’t think music could do that to someone, or I did, but only because I’d read reviews and those mention crying a lot, but it’s like, oh my god, are people seeing this, cause no one else was crying in the second song, so, I might just be overreacting, but I just thought that bit where it was just the singer was kind of beautiful, and…”

The bartender smirked, “why don’t you tell the singer that, Acorn? He’s right behind you.”

Acorn, the boy in blue leapt out of his chair, like there was an electric current through the metal, then he took a deep breath, and drew himself up to his full height, a little shorter than Connor, and turned around to face him. “I just wanted to say that I thought the second song, like the one about falling was really beautiful, except that’s probably the wrong word, cause you’re trying to be all scary and so that’s probably kind of insulting… oh god. I mean, like the words, the meaning was very meaningful, and I thought the way you said it was really well…done. And the ending, when it goes quiet again, at the end—did I already say that?—but when you talk about falling and flying again, and your voice does that thing, where it like almost rips except, it doesn’t rip, because that means it’s fragile, what I mean is it almost catches, and I almost cried again, because it was really…uh, it was really…like, it showed what you were feeling and then it was real for all of us, and wow, I’m rambling really badly.”

Connor laughed, unsure how to respond. It wasn’t that he was completely not used to praise. They did once get a favourable review in local newspaper, but it was the first he’d ever seen someone cry because of his music, the first he’d ever heard someone actually dig into the lyrics. It was like being naked, in front of a stranger, a stranger who at very least probably suspected the meanings in certain lines. Great. Now he was the freak again, just because he said it in his song. But the boy seemed to like it, and maybe he hadn’t yet dug through the words—assuming he remembered them—to analyze them. “Uh, thanks?” he breathed, after a beat of silence between them. 

And then Acorn said something that changed everything. “It just…it reminds me of something I did in my senior year. falling.” The bartender—oh, fuck, it was Kleinman on today—chimed in to tell Connor that this crazy little acorn fell out of a tree at the start of senior year. The fall had to be thirty feet. 

And he remembered what he’d said, years prior. “Isn’t that just the saddest fucking thing ever?” before he’d offered to sign his cast, let him pretend he had friends. He remembered that he wanted to leave a mark somewhere, if this guy couldn’t just see and stop him, he wanted to be immortalized somewhere. And then Siren swiped his pills. He remembered the letter, or he remembered reading about his sister, though the rest of it read like…like the kind of note he’d have written if he gave a shit about any of the people in his life who’d find it after. _This kid was Evan Hansen._


End file.
